Therapy to patients suffering from diabetes, liver diseases or other chronic diseases usually takes a long period of time. At the present time, a patient of such a disease typically receive the therapy as an out patient. A problem here is that the patient has to make frequent visit to a hospital at a cost of physical burden if the disease is to be monitored closely. On the other hand, if the patient makes less frequent visit in order to relieve the physical burden of visiting, then the close monitoring of the disease becomes impossible with an increasing risk of inadequacy in treatment.
Meanwhile, a number of systems for providing health care or for helping treatment of an at-home patient have been proposed. For example, the Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2-279056 discloses a system in which blood sugar level data of diabetics are collected through a telephone line to a microcomputer for accumulating the data individually per patient and maintaining the data as a group data. Further, the Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 4-63449 discloses another system in which outputs from a sensor attached to a patient's body are sent through a modem to a host computer installed at a hospital for issuing prescriptions. Further, the Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 8-17906 discloses another system in which a toilet bowl at a home is attached with a stool testing sensor for sending excretory information to a monitoring center via a telephone line. Still Further, the Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 3-198832 discloses another system in which diagnosis and health check are made through an audio-visual system such as the Hi-Vision system.
Each of the above prior art technologies falls into a criterion in which a medical facility or a monitoring center monitors health status of the patient while the patient is allowed to stay at home. Each of the above prior art technologies can relieve the patient of the physical burden of making visits to the medical facility. However, none of the above prior art technologies takes patients's individual differences into account when maintaining the clinical data, but instead health care instructions are made with reference only to norm values from healthy people collected as data for a group. As a result, it is difficult to provide appropriate treatment if clinical data of the patient show a change which is abnormal for this particular patient yet the change is still within a normal range obtained for the group.
Further, according to the prior art, a huge system comprising a clinical testing apparatus, a personal computer and peripherals has to be installed at a home of patient for example. This puts an economic limit to the number of patients who can afford the health care service, limiting the number of samples, which makes difficult to perform statistical maintenance of the clinical data accurately and reliably. There is another problem. Specifically, the terminal unit installed at each end such as the patient s home is calibrated initially and is capable of detecting clinical information accurately. With time however, output level of the terminal can be out of the calibration depending on environmental and operating conditions of the terminal. This reduces accuracy and reliability of the collected data, and in order to correct this problem, the terminal installed at the patient's home for example must be periodically checked and adjusted. However, if the number of terminals increases, it will become increasingly difficult to keep sending personnel for providing such periodic services.